Lockhart serves smoked meat the way butchers serve raw meat, wrapped in a rectangle of butcher paper. And its customers are encouraged to eat it the way cowboys - or maybe Neanderthals - used to, without sauce, forks, or even plates.

Vaughn, 35, gave polite but direct instructions to the man with the knife: a few slices and burnt ends of beef brisket, pork spareribs, jalapeno sausage, an end-cut pork chop, some of the clod (beef shoulder), three slices of smoked turkey. Before long, a $50 pile of barbecue held together by sheets of butcher paper sat before him on the counter - he was ordering for himself and three others - and the cashier asked if he wanted any sides.

"No," he replied. "We got pork."

Vaughn had eaten barbecue for lunch and planned to eat barbecue for lunch the following day; he also planned to spend part of the weekend at the inaugural Houston Barbecue Festival.

Asked at the counter if he ever got tired of barbecue, Vaughn replied, without hesitation, "Not good barbecue."

On Thursday, Vaughn became a walking milestone in the history of Texas barbecue when Texas Monthly announced that he had been hired as the magazine's first barbecue editor.

He will be part of Texas Monthly's ever-expanding barbecue franchise - the magazine has its own dedicated barbecue website, a barbecue finder app for cellphones and a once-every-five-years behemoth issue that lists the state's top 50 barbecue joints. It holds the annual BBQ Festival in Austin, which last year drew a crowd of 3,000.

Vaughn - a native of Ohio, resident of Dallas, husband of a woman who does not particularly care for barbecue and father of two toddlers - estimates that, since he began keeping track in 2007, he has eaten at more than 600 barbecue joints in the country, with more than 500 of those being in Texas. In five days last week, he had eaten barbecue at six locations.

Vaughn starts his new job next month, a few weeks before the release of his book, "The Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through Texas Barbecue."

He spent six months exploring the state's barbecue spots and collecting pitmasters' recipes, eating at up to 10 restaurants a day and logging 10,000 miles.

Both Vaughn and Jake Silverstein, the editor in chief of Texas Monthly, said they did not discuss any sort of fitness program as part of his new job.

"We have not discussed the health implications of being the Texas Monthly barbecue editor," Silverstein said. "He's figured out how to make the barbecue lifestyle compatible with staying above ground."